After Harry Potter: good (and different) books

Dear Annie,

Funny you should be writing about the BabyLit books now.  Just last week a customer came in saying her 6 year-old insisted on being Anna Karenina for Book Character Day because she loved reading Will's favorite BabyLit book to her baby sister.  Go figure.

Hi, I'm back from a hiatus of sorts.  The always-interesting Cyd has sent us a question I couldn't resist.  Rebekah -- 7 years old?  almost 8? -- plowed through all of Harry Potter recently.  So Cyd wants to know:

...what to read next?  What can I give her that won't feel like a huge let-down after those enormous HP volumes, that fully realized world? It doesn't need to be fantasy - in fact, she's not particularly into fantasy - but I want something just as rich. I think of some of the things I loved at her age - Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, - but they feel so much less compared to HP. I think she's a little young for Cynthia Voigt; I have read her all of Frances Hodgson Burnett; I have read her all (yes, ALL) of Louisa May Alcott; I am reading her much of L.M. Montgomery. She really likes historical fiction and for Hanukkah I bought her a 30-volume set of My Story books, which is the British version of the My America books (which she had already ripped her way through), and they are decent books but they're not Harry.

When one's child is doing amazing things -- in reading or any other endeavor -- she doesn't have to have a steady diet of the same kind of amazing.  Just as adults vary what they read, kids like to do that too.  As you know, we read the unabridged Les Miserables to Lizzie (at her insistence) when she was in second grade.  The following year she fell in love with the Animorphs series and charged through about 12 of them before abruptly dropping them and moving on to other things that I'm sure her parents liked better.  Variety is a great thing in all our lives.

So Cyd, I'm interpreting your query as looking for good stuff Rebekah can immerse herself in next.  So here are a bunch of authors worth sampling.

These four, like J.K. Rowling, wrote series in which one returns to beloved characters in successive books, seeing how they're growing up and their worlds are changing.

Hilary McKay wrote Saffy's Angel and its sequels.  Plots and themes abound in these books, but what makes them special is the four children of the eccentric Casson family.  One goes on to book after book to find out how these friends are doing.

When it came out, I wasn't immediately taken with Jeanne Birdsall's
The Penderwicks.  It felt like it was trying a little to hard to have an old-fashioned feel: a family of four girls (oh. you probably already know this one, Cyd) having wholesome adventures on summer vacation while still missing their dead mother.  But talking with kids over the years, and seeing how many come back for the sequels -- #4 is due out on Tuesday -- has changed my mind.  I gave an advance copy of the book to a wonderful family one of whose children dressed at The Penderwicks: the book for Halloween.  They talked with me about the excitement of opening the book and catching up with the characters, who are now old friends.  It sounded so much like our family's experience with the Harry Potter books -- it was really moving.

Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time and sequels has more of what Cyd calls the "fully realized world."  You did a lovely blog on them here.

Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books feature children from three different families who have summertime adventures in England and Scotland in the 1930s.  They have everything to do with kids and boats and elaborate games of imagination.

I would encourage Cyd and Rebekah to pick up E. Nesbit and Edward Eager again.  They're both delightful, and they spend a lot of time -- with a heavy dose of humor -- on siblings in large families.  Eleanor loved the Half Magic series almost four years ago, but if she were to revisit those books now, she'd get lots more out of them.  Just as Rebekah may end up with the thrill of discovery all over again if she picks up Harry Potter when she's 12.  E. Nesbit is viewed as a seminal writer of 20th century children's literature because she wrote about realistic relationships among family members.  My favorite of her magical books is Five Children and It, in which everything that can go wrong with a wish does.  But the one our entire family loved best was
The Railway Children, the story of city children who move with their mother to the countryside after their father is falsely accused of spying.

The Prydain Chronicles -- starting with The Book of Three -- by Lloyd Alexander could be a lot of fun for  Rebekah.  They're loosely based on Welsh mythology.  Harry Potter incorporates elements of lots of mythology of the British Isles -- she might find some familiar stories.  The current Book of Three paperback has a scary image that I've found turns some kids off.  The book isn't as creepy as the picture.

And while we're adventuring, don't forget Robert Louis Stevenson.  Treasure Island is still a great read.

Moving closer to the twenty-first century, I suspect Rebekah would connect with Sharon Creech's books.  Walk Two Moons is her best-known, and spectacular -- it has a lot to do with characters telling each other stories.  Mona and Lizzie's favorite was Bloomability, about a lower-middle class girl who ends up in a Swiss boarding school for a year, completely out of her element, and figures out what's important in people and in life.

 And last, there's some contemporary historical fiction.  Has Rebekah tried any books by Karen Cushman yet?  Here's a complete list: most of them are set in medieval or Elizabethan times.  She's probably best known for The Midwife's Apprentice, which won a Newbery medal.  Most of her main  characters are children who have been rejected by the people who should be caring for them.  They learn to make their own way in the world, often with the help/supervision of unlikely adults.

I hope there are some surprises in this list.  Enjoy!

Love,

Deborah

Madeline L'Engle as chick lit

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Yes, I'm a big L'Engle fan, and a bit of a completist: I'm pretty sure I've read every YA book she wrote, and own a copy of most of them.  I read and re-read a number of YA authors obsessively:  Cynthia Voight, Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, and Paula Danziger were my favorites aside from L'Engle.  More on them in another post.

The Austins books never really grabbed me.  They were well-written, but they didn't contain the spark that the Wrinkle in Time series held.  I think part of it is that I could never fully identify with Vicky Austin: too normal and pretty and well-adjusted.  Give me an outcast nerd poised to bloom, anytime.

L'Engle saw her YA novels as being written in two different frameworks.  I think of them as realistic and magical, but a little searching has helped me with the terms she herself used: Chronos and Kairos.  Wikipedia explains:

The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.

Wrinkle in Time and the other books following the Murry-O'Keefe families are, of course, Kairos.  The Austins and their ilk are Chronos.  I remember buying one of L'Engle's later books in hardcover and finding a chart, a sort of double family tree, in the inside front cover.  It was wildly exciting, laying out all of the characters in both sets of books and their relationships to each other, and indicating the few characters that move between the two frameworks.  This was one of the pleasures of reading so much L'Engle: you keep finding characters you know at one age from one book at a completely different age in another.

So, a few favorites:

The Young Unicorns is one of the Austin family books, but the character I remember most strongly from it is Vicky's friend Emily Gregory, a brilliant blind musician.  The book is set in New York, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and has some intense scenes in abandoned subway tunnels as well as at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where L'Engle worked for years..  It's a mystery, full of danger and intrigue.  It's my favorite Chronos book, hands down.

The second-generation Kairos books focus on Meg and Calvin's oldest child (they have seven.  And are professional scientists together.  How can you not love them?).  Polyhymnia is called Poly in some books and Polly in others; in any case, she was my second-favorite L'Engle heroine, after Meg.  My favorite of the Polly books is the last, chronologically: A House Like A Lotus.  It's a complex read, despite the cheesy cover picture on this now out-of-print edition.  Polly is 16 years old, working at a conference in Cyprus, mentored by an older lesbian woman named Maxa.  Maxa is terminally ill, and in a moment of misery and drunkenness she makes a move on Polly, which sends Polly running.  Much of the book is about Polly trying to work through what she feels was a major breach of trust, and coming to terms with the complexity of loving someone as a mentor even after she disappoints you personally.  It's a really good book.

Finally, there are L'Engle's two semi-autobiographical novels, The Small Rain and
A Severed Wasp.  They're labeled as adult fiction, but I read them as a teenager and loved them.  L'Engle's alter-ego is a pianist named Katherine Forrester.  The first book focuses on her young-womanhood; in the second, she is 70 years old, returning to New York from a life in Europe.   I remember both as pleasingly sweeping and dramatic.

What a pleasure to revisit these books!  I really need to dig some boxes out of my parents' storage room.

Love, Annie